Shutting down large events like concerts and sports seems justified. They're rare (though that could be selection bias), but when a SSE happens at one of them, they lead to huge numbers of cases (600+ on average).
Yes. Though here in Victoria, our state Little Athletics has been shut down - but the Australian Tennis Open is continuing, "limited" to 30,000 visitors a day. "Based on public health advice." Ahem.
Nursing homes and prisons are responsible for a ridiculous number of SSE cases. (More than 40%.) Why aren't we focusing huge numbers of resources on these two institutions, and paying much less attention to bars and hair salons?
Essentially it's a large number of people crammed together indoors - and almost all of them with immune systems weakened by poor food, lack of exercise and sunlight. Improving conditions for them would reduce covid (and other) infections, be decent and humane - but take some time (rebuilding shitty old buildings) and cost a lot of money. Much quicker and cheaper (for the government) to just close hairdressers.
Corona-chan likes refrigeration. That's interesting, because the last study I saw that tried to explain why areas like SE Asia and Africa had lower incidence rates dismissed temperature as a factor, and attributed it more to things like humidity. Not that it's a direct contradiction, because high and low temperatures don't necessarily have opposite effects, but it's something worth exploring further.
It may simply be that every refrigerated space is also a confined space - and fans drive the air around. And of course chilling preserves all living organisms for longer, including viruses. So you have cool air preserving a virus and a bunch of fans spreading it evenly through that confined space.
As I understand it, when the West still worked on chemical and biological weapons, one of the issues they had was achieving aerosol dispersion - it's not use killing one guy 100 times and someone right next to him is fine. They wanted to spread the dangerous materials evenly through the air to maximise their number of victims. So when thinking of something like covid, think like an NBC warrior/war criminal - if you wanted to maximise the number of people affected, where would you hit them?
Then you think, well, large coolrooms are a good bet, so are places where people are confined together with aircon recycling the air, but outdoors in the sunshine spread out won't get you many victims.
Or as someone else put it, if you can smell their farts, they can give you covid.